Adapt or die. That is the stark challenge to
living in the new world we have made
David
Wallace-Wells
We need to decarbonise and fast. But ‘adaptation’, the
ways in which we protect people from the crisis, is not a dirty word
Sun 1 Aug
2021 08.00 BST
It won’t be
enough. It can’t be. From here, even an astonishing pace of decarbonisation
will still deliver us a warmer world than we have today, full of more
eye-opening extremes and more deeply disruptive disasters of the kind, we are
learning this summer, that even the wealthiest and most climate-conscious
countries are unprepared for. No one is.
That is
what Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, meant when he wrote, with the capital
inundated, that the city was now on the frontline of the climate emergency and
it is the central lesson of the Met Office’s annual report on the state of the
UK climate, which found that mild British weather was already a relic of a
bygone era. The Climate Crisis Advisory Group, led by Sir David King, recently
declared that greenhouse gas levels were already so high that they foreclosed a
“manageable future for humanity”. “Nowhere is safe,” King said, provoking a
host of headlines.
The
headlines are right, of course, but in their appeals to the local narcissism of
climate panic, they also elide the gaping differences in the capacities of the
countries of the world to respond to what is coming. Which is why perhaps the
most harrowing of this summer’s extreme weather events, even more than the
model-breaking Pacific heat dome, was the devastating flooding in Henan
province, China, where rapid recent infrastructure expansion has inspired
bitter envy across the western world.
At the last
count, 99 people died in the flooding, not to mention millions of chickens and
other livestock. In Henan, all told, 2.59m acres of crops were damaged. The
cost of the disaster, according to still-growing estimates, was more than $14bn
(£10.7bn), of which only a small fraction would be covered by insurance. In
Henan’s capital, Zhengzhou, subway passengers went to work waist-deep in water,
producing photographs and videos that put the images from London into context.
All these disasters are less punishing and destructive than they might have
been several generations ago, but they show that, for all the progress made,
even the world’s vanguard infrastructure – the built kind, the natural kind and
the human kind – is failing the test of even today’s climate, which is the
mildest and most benign we will ever see again.
Already,
the planet is hotter – at just 1.2C or 1.3C of warming on preindustrial levels
– than it has ever been in the long stretch of human civilisation. As a
species, everything we have ever known – our histories, our agriculture, our
cultures, our politics, our geopolitics – is the result of climate conditions
that we have already left behind. It is as if we have landed on a different
planet, with a different climate, and are now trying to determine what aspects
of the civilisations we’ve brought with us can survive and what will have to be
reshaped or discarded.
The word
for this in the climate vernacular is “adaptation” and it has been, for a few
decades, a dirty one, seen as an alternative to rapid decarbonisation rather
than its necessary, humanitarian partner. The project to protect the people of
the world from the impacts of even a more stable climate may prove larger, in
the end, than the project of stabilising it, which has so preoccupied us for
decades.
Unfortunately,
to this point, while mortality from natural disaster has fallen dramatically
over the past 100 years, the returns on engineered adaptations to climate
impacts, in particular, have been maddeningly spotty. Advocates point to
awe-inspiring flood-management systems in the Netherlands, but the $14bn levees
built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 don’t protect against
category-five hurricanes today. The challenges will grow, in some cases
exponentially, but the blueprint of adaptation is there for all to see, a
photo-negative of all of the impacts that scientists have told us to expect
even within the next few decades: heat stress and sea-level rise, wildfires and
river flooding, agricultural decline, economic stagnation, migration crises,
conflict and state collapse.
In a
certain way, a response to sea-level rise is the easiest to envisage. Its most
dramatic impacts arrive slowly, over centuries, giving generations time to
adjust. However, the adjustment will have to be very large indeed. Perhaps half
the world’s coastline will have to be eventually abandoned, the other half
protected by defensive infrastructure of a scale straight out of Cyberpunk,
although “natural” responses such as restored wetlands and mangrove forests can
also play a role. Such places as Bangladesh or Myanmar, barring meaningful
climate reparations, will probably focus on flood-alarm systems, concrete
bunkers and a goal of “managed retreat”.
Declines in
deaths during heatwaves in parts of Europe have shown that there are some possible
responses to that problem. They include more widespread air- conditioning and
public cooling centres; better public communication and water-drinking
campaigns; and reworking the elements of urban infrastructure, such as asphalt
and black roofs, which amplify dangerous temperatures.
Farmlands can’t be moved all that much, but crops can
be genetically edited to thrive in the new world
Whether
these measures will work as well in much poorer parts of the world, once
extreme heat is daily rather than seasonal, remains to be seen. Farmlands can’t
be moved all that much, but crops can be genetically edited to thrive in the
new world, with aversions to GM foods becoming either a residue of an earlier
era of relative abundance or a luxury of the affluent or both.
In theory,
the fossil-fuel business could be functionally replaced by negative-emissions
plantations, both industrial and “natural”, undoing the whole work of
industrialisation by recapturing carbon from the sky. But this is not work that
can be done out of sight or out of mind. Planting forests at a scale large
enough to meaningfully alter the planet’s carbon trajectory, for instance,
could raise food prices by 80%. Reforestation might require, according to one
recent review, a land area between five and 15 times the size of Texas. Even in
the most optimistic scenario, billions of tons of carbon would have to be
removed from the air every year and stored somewhere – and less optimistic
scenarios will require even more.
The world's vanguard infrastructure is failing in
today's climate, which is the most benign we will ever see again
These
measures aren’t trivial and they aren’t a way to avoid hard choices. They are a
last-resort attempt to square the punishing climate we are making with one that
we may feel comfortable living in. This is the face of the new world. Or it
will be, if we’re lucky, committing ourselves as much to world-building as
world-saving.
David
Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth and is editor at large
at New York Magazine
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